Funerals for the Old World - New York Times

30/11/08 6:06 AM

May 5, 2002

Funerals for the Old World

By RICHARD LOURIE

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JOSEPH ROTH

Translated by Michael Hofmann.
281 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.
''BACK then, we didn't go to Europe, Europe came to us!'' joked my shtetl-born aunt. That quip about
tourism by invasion would have elicited a wry smile from Joseph Roth, who attended the university in
Austro-Hungarian Lemberg, a city variously known in Russian, Polish and Ukrainian as Lvov, Lwow,
Lviv. Tragic history shimmers in those dancing vowels.
Roth was born in 1894 in the Galician town of Brody, which he mythologizes in retrospect la Chagall
and Babel: ''My birthplace was home to about 10,000 people. Three thousand of them were insane, if not
dangerously so.'' It was a ''little town in Russia which no longer exists, which has died, which has fallen
in the Great War, as if it had been an infantryman.'' He was almost 20 when World War I began; it was,
he declared, his ''strongest experience,'' along with ''the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever
had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.''
Roth became one of Europe's leading and best-paid journalists in the years between the two world wars,
the era of Freud and Hitler, Einstein and Stalin. Drinking heavily, broke, in despair, he died in Paris in
May 1939, the last spring of peace. Nonetheless, he was a casualty of the coming war. The Germans had
not yet invaded Poland, but Kristallnacht and the taking of the Sudetenland were both wounds and
prophecies for him. Roth's world was falling apart again, and this time he went with it.
As a writer of prose fiction, Roth had several identities and voices. He spoke one way about the
fantastical world of Slavs, Gypsies and Jews, another about the spas and cafes of Vienna, Paris and
Amsterdam, but always with a tone of reverence and heartbroken nostalgia for the rule of the Emperor
Franz Joseph. The war had split Roth into parts.
A similarly fragmentary quality can be felt in ''The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth,'' which includes
work that ranges from the immature and unfinished to the full masterpiece. To publish all a writer's false
starts and minutiae is the literary equivalent of the retrospective, a signal that a reputation is being
advanced, a position aggressively taken on the bourse of renown. It is a needless exaggeration to claim,
as the publisher does, that Roth's stories ''will place him among the masters of the short-story form.'' Only
two out of the 17 have a chance.
What Roth delivers, he delivers superbly and uniquely -- his is the voice of the late Austro-Hungarian
Empire, its golden glories, tragic demise, bitter aftermath. Roth, who like many antifascist intellectuals
was very leftist for a time, was in his soul a conservative, an adoring apologist for the ancien rgime. To
him, life then was simply more various and therefore more interesting.
Roth is a dexterous master at depicting that variety. He knows an amazing number of specific details
about work, trades, food, customs, uniforms, regulations and superstitions. For example, the belief, used
in two stories, that ''whoever had a hanged man's rope would get a lot of milk from his cows, his horses
would thrive, the wheat would grow heavy on his fields and he himself would be immune to the Evil
Eye.'' In both stories, the possessor of the rope sells it off piece by piece until nothing is left. And in both
he larcenously considers it a shame to lose such a nice income when there's still some other rope around.
Roth employs three basic modes in these stories: first, there is the blend of the amorous, the lyrical and
the triste in works like ''Stationmaster Fallmerayer''; there are also semimythic accounts of his hometown
and of life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and finally there is what could be called acerbic Viennese
misogyny. His imagination is refreshingly uninhibited: he can just as easily portray an old working
woman who wasted her life on a selfish son as he can an aristocrat bristling at the new vulgarians.

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Funerals for the Old World - New York Times

30/11/08 6:06 AM

That range is apparent from the start, even in the stories Roth does not yet know how to write or finish,
with characters either dying or simply leaving, never to be heard from again (though later those same
devices will serve the more mature tales perfectly well). He is a writer of exuberant metaphors -- a young
man is as ''thin as the ghost of a poet''; ''The sun came out, as though back from holiday.'' But Roth's
greatest strength is his ability to depict the mercurial changes of fate. His novellas, though light-handed,
are epic in scope, time and action, just as his great multigenerational novel, ''The Radetzky March,'' is
somehow terse. Roth's rippling of luxurious serenity and nervous intensity is beautifully rendered from
German into English by Michael Hofmann, except for a few anachronistic Americanisms (dances
rendered as ''hops,'' a girlfriend called a ''squeeze'') that slipped through the filter.
The collection's two great stories are, of course, connected with the war and the fall of the empire.
Stationmaster Fallmerayer, in the story of that name, is a dutiful civil servant married to ''a good woman,
slightly dim, no longer in the first flush of her youth,'' who bears him twin girls when what he wanted
was a son. In short, he is ''not an obvious candidate for an unusual fate.'' But among the victims of a
train wreck near his station is Countess Walewska, a Russian aristocrat who recuperates at his home. She
speaks German with a ''harsh and strange Russian accent. All the splendor of distance and the unknown
were in her throat.'' She leaves behind a smell of leather and perfume in his apartment, ''in his memory,
yes, one could even say, in his heart.''
Mobilized at the outbreak of World War I and sent to the Eastern Front, Fallmerayer searches for the
countess, finds her and wins her love. ''He blessed the war and the occupation. Nothing terrified him as
much as a sudden return of peace. . . . Never again peace on earth.'' Yet it is not peace that proves his
enemy but the return of the count, presumed dead in the war, now an invalid in a wheelchair. The
countess, pregnant with Fallmerayer's child, has promised to tell her husband everything. Instead, she
feeds him and puts him to bed. Fallmerayer ''saw out of the corner of his eye, his mistress plump up the
pillows and sit down on the side of the bed. And then Fallmerayer left; nothing has ever been heard of
him since.''
In some ways Tolstoyan -- railroads as instruments of fate, adultery as dead end -- and Chekhovian in its
elegant wistfulness, the story is really quite Rothian. Free of moral judgment, its main concern is fidelity
to the shame and excitement of adultery. Betrayal and sexual honor are recurrent themes in Roth.
The other great story, ''The Bust of the Emperor,'' traces the disillusion and decline of Count Franz Xaver
Morstin, a true son of the empire: ''He thought of himself neither as Polish nor Italian, neither as a
member of the Polish aristocracy nor an aristocrat of Italian descent.'' He loathes the idea of nationalism
-- Not even monkeys could have come up with that one.'' It is modern, artificial, divisive, unlike the old
empire, ''a large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people.'' The count
follows the ''family tradition'' of ''largess'' out of virtue and conviction: ''It is the profoundest and noblest
desire of the common people to know that the mighty are just and noble. This is why it takes such
terrible vengeance when it is disappointed.''
A healthy and humane world has been succeeded by one that is small and nasty. It is time to bury the
bust of the Emperor Franz Joseph, which the count has salvaged from the wreckage of the past and
which he salutes in allegiance each day. ''It was time to bury the old world. But it had to be buried with
dignity.'' Everyone takes part, all the various religious leaders and the townspeople: the Ukrainian
carpenter makes the coffin, the Polish blacksmith fashions a brass double eagle for the lid, the local
Torah scribe writes ''with a goose quill on parchment the blessing that pious Jews are supposed to speak
when they behold a crowned head.'' It is a perfect ecumenical funeral for the emperor and the empire, but
the local newspaper gives it only ''a few light-hearted words, under the heading 'Marginal Notes.' ''
Roth was the last who saw the best.
Richard Lourie's latest book, ''Sakharov: A Biography,'' was published in March.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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